Jiyeon (Siyeona) Chang is a student in Columbia’s PhD program in Sociology, where she is a Paul Lazarsfeld Fellow, and an Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) Fellow. She is interested in how cultural, artistic and semantic boundaries emerge and change in the context of structural transformation and globalization. Prior to coming to Columbia, she worked as an economist/policy analyst on issues related to international trade and global value chains at the United Nations (FAO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. Siyeona holds M.A. and B.A. degrees from Stanford University.

Pierre-Christian Fink, Current Students

Pierre-Christian Fink is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He is interested in the (sometimes autonomous) role of ideas in economic policy. Pierre majored in economics at the University of Tuebingen and earned his Master's degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Columbia University, Pierre worked as a business journalist; his articles appeared in the German edition of The Financial Times and Die Zeit.

Mark Hoffman, Current Students

Mark Anthony Hoffman is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University. He is interested in applying novel computational methods, such as large scale text processing and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to classical sociological problems, such as the emergence of group identity and solidarity. His recent work, with Noam Zerubavel, Adam Reich, and Peter Bearman, uses fMRI to study how social relations are encoded in the brain and successfully predicts the formation of social relations from neural signatures. Mark received his BA in Social Research and Public Policy from New York University Abu Dhabi.

Julian Jürgenmeyer, Current Students

Julian is a PhD student in Sociology at Columbia University. His interests include economic sociology, the sociology of expertise, and political sociology. In his dissertation he investigates regulatory responses to the financial crisis starting in 2007. Julian came to Columbia as a Fulbright fellow after obtaining his B.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University in Berlin.

Luciana de Souza Leão, Current Students

Luciana de Souza Leão is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Puc-Rio and a M.A. in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Before coming to Columbia, Luciana worked in three large projects examining a) the relationship between NGOs and the Brazilian State (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); b) a comparative study about discursive and behavioral strategies that members of stigmatized groups use to cope with racism and discrimination in Brazil, United States and Israel (Harvard University); and c) an impact evaluation of Brazil’s financial literacy project (World Bank). She is currently interested in the politics of social policy evaluation in developing countries, particularly in the epistemological and organizational reasons behind the recent push for the use of RCTs as to evaluate development policies.

Moran Levy, Current Students

Moran Levy is PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. She is interested in medical sociology, economic sociology, and sociology of science, knowledge and technology. In her current research, she focuses on the American market of pharmaceuticals and on processes of drug development. Moran received her MA in sociology from Tel-Aviv University, after completing her studies in the Adi Lautman Program for Outstanding Students.

Nicholas Pang, Current Students

Nicholas Pang is a Ph.D candidate in sociology who studies race and ethnicity, religion, organizations, and culture. He is interested how racial, ethnic, and religious identities and groups develop in the process of organizational change and social movements, using social network and comparative historical methods. He received his BA in Sociology and East Asian studies from Princeton University.

Sandra Portocarrero, Current Students

Sandra Portocarrero is an organizational sociologist. She is a Provost Diversity Fellow, a Paul Lasarzfeld Fellow, a 2015 PD Soros Fellow, and a 2017 National Science Foundation (NSF) GRFP Fellow. Her research interests include meaning-making processes and intra-organizational dynamics. Sandra's current work explores how inter-subjectively shared meaning structures, particularly the process of creating symbolic boundaries, is shaped, enabled, and constrained by organizational characteristics such as racial/ethnic composition, class composition, and resources. Sandra holds an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University, and a B.A. (High Honors) from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joan H. Robinson, Current Students

Joan H. Robinson is a sociologist of law, science, and medicine with interests in gender inequality and families. Her dissertation, "Bodies of Knowledge: Diagnosis and Control on the Maternal-Fetal Frontier," examines the home pregnancy test, the diagnostic device that is most widely used by lay people. Previously, Joan worked for five years working as an attorney at The Legal Aid Society in New York City, the oldest, largest, and most influential legal services provider in the U.S., where she represented low-income families in civil litigation.

Sarah Elizabeth Sachs, Current Students

Sarah Sachs is a PhD student in sociology, researching organizations, technology, and the process by which developers and users alter the structure of social relations in the material world via online applications and devices and the production and distribution of data between them.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Sarah enjoyed a tech career, most recently at Google, where she worked with a team of developers and became deeply engaged in user experience research and feature development. Sarah completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California-Davis.

Kiran Samuel, Current Students

Kiran Samuel is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical digital studies, cultural studies, media studies, and science and technology studies. She is particularly interested in understanding how technology shapes material conditions for marginalized communities, as well as how those communities might use new media to achieve alternative futures. Her current project explores how search engine algorithms introduce, confirm, and sustain ideologies through predictive search. Before coming to Columbia University, Kiran worked as a creative strategist in the advertising industry, with clients including Google, YouTube, and other companies turned subjects of her research. She received her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, and her BA in Philosophy and Journalism from Rutgers University.

Daniel Sands, Current Students

Daniel Sands is currently a PhD candidate specializing in Strategy and Organization Theory in the Department of Management and Organizations at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. David Stark supervised his Master's Thesis (Socio-Economic Behavior and the Construction of Value and Price within Auctions) while he was in the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program at Columbia University. Daniel's current research focuses on the social construction of markets, and addresses topics such as evaluation, valuation, and price. Prior to receiving his M.A. at Columbia University, Daniel completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona where he quadruple majored in Economics, Political Science, Finance, and Accounting.

Daniel Tadmon, Current Students

Daniel Tadmon is a PhD student in the department of sociology at Columbia University. He is interested in cultural and in medical sociology, and in science, knowledge, and technology studies. He received an MA in clinical psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after completing his studies in the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University.

Elizabeth Watkins, Current Students

Elizabeth Watkins is a PhD Student in the Communications program at Columbia University. She holds a BA from the University of California-Irvine and a Master of Science from MIT, and spent two years as a case writer at Harvard Business School. As an organizational ethnographer drawing from science and technology studies as well as human-computer interaction, she uses qualitative methods to study how workers interact with tools of cybersecurity, privacy, and encryption. Her current research focuses on the management of information security in the gig economy. Venues where she's presented her work include CHI (forthcoming 2018), CSCW (forthcoming 2018), ICA (forthcoming 2018), 4S, the ISA World Congress of Sociology (forthcoming 2018), USENIX Enigma, USENIX, FOCI, and IEEE CTS. Her case studies on digital advertising and the sharing economy have been taught at HBS, the Yale School of Management, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Daniel Wojtkiewicz, Current Students

Daniel Wojtkiewicz is PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He is interested in medical sociology, and science, knowledge and technology studies. His current work focuses on differential diagnosis along the MR-autism border, and how precision medicine and genetic research seeks to reconfigure autism diagnosis.